Organ Donor Quest Is A Relentless Task

June 12, 1986|By Alan Bavley, Medical Writer

Les Olson was taking a short break Wednesday afternoon before making the long drive from Boynton Beach to the University of Miami to deliver a pair of kidneys that will be transplanted into waiting patients.

He had been up all night helping a team of surgeons at Bethesda Memorial Hospital remove the kidneys, heart and pancreas from a woman who died of a gunshot wound to her head.

``Some people have been waiting years and years and years for a transplant,`` Olson said. ``There are people who die waiting and that`s really sad.``

Olson directs the organ retrieval program for the University of Miami Organ Transplant Center, the agency that coordinates organ donations in Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.

Organs for transplant are scarce. So when a donor becomes available, Olson has to be ready at a moment`s notice to locate the right recipients for the organs, arrange transportation and have surgeons ready to perform the removal and transplant operations.

Olson was just completing the removal of a heart and kidneys Tuesday night from a patient at a Broward County hospital when he learned from Bethesda Memorial that a female donor was available there.

Boynton Beach police had found the 30-year-old Ocean Ridge woman Monday night in a car in front of the Sea Mist Marina. She had a fatal gunshot wound in the right side of her head.

Doctors at Bethesda Memorial determined she was brain dead; only machines were keeping her alive. The family of the woman told the hospital that she had wanted to be an organ donor.

Olson ordered tissue tests on the woman. He drove back to the University of Miami to consult his computer to find the right recipient for her heart.

By about 2 a.m. Wednesday, Olson had narrowed the list down to three patients in New Jersey, Alabama and Texas. After talking to their doctors, he determined that the Texas patient, who had been waiting four months for a heart, was most desparate for the organ.

The three-hour operation, called a harvest, to remove the woman`s vital organs began about 7:45 a.m. Surgeons from San Antonio, who would be transplanting the heart back in Texas, already had arrived at Bethesda Memorial to assist in the procedure.

The heart remains viable only for about three hours after it is removed from a donor. It was taken out first, packed in ice and driven by ambulance to Palm Beach International Airport where a chartered jet was waiting.

The woman`s pancreas was placed in an ice chest. Portions of the organ that produce insulin may be transplanted later to a diabetic at the University of Miami in a procedure that is still in the experimental stages.

The kidneys were attached to a portable machine Olson helped design that keeps them cool and supplied with oxygenated blood. The machine can keep the kidneys alive for 36 hours until recipients can be found.

Olson carries in his jacket pocket a list several feet long of the 175 people in South Florida who are waiting for kidney transplants. The waiting list would be unnecessary if more donors were available, he said.

Olson`s program harvests organs from about 100 donors a year. But if all the potential donors in South Florida became available, he would be harvesting organs from a new donor every day, he said.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, there are about 20,000 brain deaths a year in the United States. Of these, about 8,000 would make good donor candidates. But only about 2,700 of these people actually become organ donors.

``If we got those 8,000 there would be no waiting lists,`` Olson said.

Olson said it is often the parents of young people who are asked to donate their children`s organs for transplants and it is difficult for them make that decision.

``We don`t lose our children. Our children are never supposed to die before us,`` he said. ``We can think of going to a son or daughter`s graduation or wedding, but we never think of going ot his funeral. That`s why it`s so hard (for parents) to let go.``

Olson said he had set a goal for himself this year to find a kidney for a least one of four young people in South Florida who have been on dialysis waiting for a transplant for more than 10 years. Two weeks ago one of them received a new kidney. ``That made my year,`` he said.